Born in 1983, Kim Hye-jin debuted with a short story “Chicken Run” in 2012 and received the 5 th Joongang Literary Award for Central Station in 2013. Unlike young writers her age, Kim does not go into exile in a virtual space or hides herself among probable episodes. She does not leave her world to look for hope, but instead she finds love in people at the cusp of desolation. She tells us to come take a look here with her. A world that people turn away from because of its stench, noise, and ugliness is for Kim a world to explore to find people who thrive in the darkest place. She tells us that here, you will also find an ageless soil called love that these people till. This is what makes the love story in Central Station particularly special. The more they become abstract, tainted, and pitiful, the higher their story of love rises above the world of senses to grab our attention.

Kang Byoung Yoong was born in 1975 and teaches Korean literature in the Department of Asian Studies in Slovenia’s Ljubljana University. His novels include The Story of an Imaginary Human, A Detailed Report on Mr. Y’s Castration , and Aluminum Cucumber , and his short story collections include Extremely and Kiss and Banana. He has also written a book of literary theory titled A Study on Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and the essay collections Ljubljana, a City that Resembles My Wife and I Love You But I Really Love You . He was supported by the Korea Commission for Culture and the Arts to undertake artist residencies in Russia and England. Nothing is new under the sun, but make it new! Kang has used imitation and parody to create new forms and unfamiliar discourses. His omnibus-like novel The Story of an Imaginary Human is a human version of Borges’s The Story of Imaginary Animals , and his A Detailed Report on Mr. Y’s Castration , a novel told through sixty fictional newspaper articles, is a take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude . His recent short story in Axt is likewise written entirely through newspaper articles. Aluminum Cucumber is also taken from the original Viktor Tsoi to be copied and parodied to suit his own style. It is the merging of an experimental form uncommon in Korean literature with a Western literary sensibility.

Seo Su-jin is born and raised in Seoul. She is a certified Korean language lecturer and has taught at several universities in Seoul. Her debut novel Korean Teachers won the 25th Hankyoreh Literature Prize in 2020. In 2021, she published the novella Gold Rush as well as the novel Yujin and Dave in Hyundae Munhak magazine. Su-jin now lives in Sydney, Australia, and her next novel Summer Hill High School will be published in 2022.